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A recent article in the Voices section of Scientific American by Josie Glausiusz on March 20, 2018 addresses the stereotype that elderly women are incapable of understanding scientific and technical topics.

The Maria Goeppert Mayer Award is presented annually to a woman physicist in the early years of her career. The award consists of $3,000 plus a travel allowance to provide opportunities for the recipient to give lectures in her field of physics at up to three institutions and at the APS meeting at which the award is bestowed.

The award is given to a woman in the early years of her career (not later than ten years after the granting of her Ph.D.) for scientific achievements that demonstrate her potential as an outstanding physicist.

"Once, when Alison Coil was on a grant review panel, an unusual situation arose: Applications had come in from two people at similar points in their career on similar topics. One was from a white male, the other from a woman of color.

Dr. Coil, an astrophysicist at the University of California in San Diego, remembers the reaction as being mixed. While the women on the panel generally liked the female applicant’s proposal, one white man called it “too ambitious.” The woman didn’t get the funding."

In the April issue of The American Sociological Review, Natasha Quadlin (Ohio State University) reports that women who earn high grades are less likely to receive job offers. She highlights this and other findings in her article "The Mark of a Woman’s Record: Gender and Academic Performance in Hiring".

"Later this year is the centenary of the end of the First World War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, which led to the deaths of nearly 20 million people. But as Patricia Fara shows in her new book, A Lab of One’s Own, the Great War also gave some women the chance to emerge from the shadows and show their mettle as scientists, whether by digging experimental trenches to research trench foot, x-raying wounded soldiers on the battlefront, or inventing explosives."